Battle Over Fracking Waste Opens In Legislature

Opponents Want To Ban Waste Products From Other States

HARTFORD -- The legislative battle over banning or regulating "fracking waste" in Connecticut opened Friday with a barrage of testimony about the environmental dangers this industrial byproduct may bring.

Connecticut's new commissioner of energy and environmental protection, Robert Klee, urged lawmakers to give the state authority to regulate the wastes produced by natural gas drilling as a hazardous material.

He said a bill proposed by his agency would give state regulators "cradle-to-grave oversight" for any fracking waste products that might enter Connecticut.

Activists like Leah Lopez Schmalz, of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, insisted Klee's plan would be "an incomplete solution" to the problem and that the best way to safeguard public health in this state would be to ban potentially toxic fracking waste completely.

Steven Guveyan, executive director of the Connecticut Petroleum Council, offered testimony sharply opposing both new regulations or a ban as "scientifically unjustified" and unnecessary. He pointed out that low gas and oil prices -- which could be attributed to use of fracking -- provide real benefits to Connecticut consumers and businesses.

Fracking is the "hydraulic fracturing" process used to pump natural gas out of certain types of shale deposits. It is unlikely to be used in Connecticut because this state doesn't contain that type of shale. Instead, the debate is about the millions of gallons of water and chemicals that are pumped into the ground to push the gas out.

Much of that contaminated water, from natural gas shale fields in Pennsylvania and potentially in New York, needs to be recycled or treated for disposal. There are already hundreds of controversial fracking wells in Pennsylvania, and New York officials are considering approval of the process for extracting gas from shale deposits in their state.

State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, said at the hearing before the legislature's Environment Committee that approval by New York would bring the fracking waste issue "right to our doorstep. He said there are private industrial waste treatment plants in Connecticut where fracking waste could be treated.

He said some Pennsylvania treatment plants have stopped processing fracking waste because it was too corrosive. Steinberg warned that some fracking waste samples have registered as radioactive.

"We view this as a public health and safety issue," Steinberg said.

Steinberg and other activists warned that, although there's no indication it's now being done in Connecticut, some communities around the nation have reportedly used fracking waste as de-icing products for snowy roads.

Guveyan argued that oil and gas wastes are already regulated as "special wastes" under federal law. He said adding new regulations would be "prohibitively expensive and unnecessarily burdensome."

Nearly all of the dozens of people who turned out for Friday's hearing were there to call for a ban or, at the least, tough state regulation of fracking waste.